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Anticipating spring holidays: Poetry day 3

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Last week, I began Friday morning by walking to Temple Anshe Amunim to talk with Rabbi Josh Breindel about Passover, Pesach. I am not Jewish, but I know this holiday in some part from the inside. My old friend Rachel, the Velveteen Rabbi and the Rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel, has invited me to her Seder, and I have loved it.

Pesach celebrates the story of the Exodus. It celebrates the day Moses led his people out of Israel, when they left their homes and their kneading troughs and walked out into the desert. Everything changes. Everything is new, and you can’t see ahead. I remember the feeling Rachel’s Seder gave me, of choice, of having the confidence to set out, standing on the shore and listening to the reed sea and thinking — what next?

seder

Talking with Rabbi Breindel, I remembered that feeling. He sang for me, the driving and joyful dayenu and a quiet, resonant psalm he said his father used to sing when he was a boy. And he made the excitement of the holiday tangible.

We talked about preparing for holidays, throwing open the windows, cleaning house, making matzah by hand, planning for his son, for his students, for the holiday at home and the holiday with his congregation.

And as he talked I thought about my own holidays, baking sweet rolls with homemade orange peel before Easter, the treasure hunts my parents used to make for our birthdays, the soaring high glee that came with knowing that somehow today would be different.

My spring holidays have meant family, too, and newborn lambs or kid goats at my grandparents’ farm, and a morning service at the small stone church where my grandparents are buried. They’ve meant old friends and an Easter egg hunt that began as a child’s game.

Shaker5

And they’ve meant stories of renewal, of grief, of a time when you lost everything — and then gained more than you lost — and suddenly everything was new, everything had changed, and you believed you could make things happen. When I think about it, Easter and Passover have a lot in common, and not only because the last supper was a Passover Seder.

Pesach, the Hebrew for Passover, and Paschal, the adjective meaning ‘of Easter,’ share a root. The French for Easter is Paques, from the Latin Paschalia. The two holidays seem to share a name. I asked Rachel, and she agreed. I hope it’s a moeable and shareable joy.

A charm for between times

Walk from newsroom to temple
and let movement make you calm.
you have come to talk to the Rabbi
before the Seder. Listening to
who people are, what moves them
is who you are. Begin

with the past. Keep questions simple.
When you ask, he sings a psalm
his father sang to him, a lithe
music, and it moves you
to hold the gift you’ve been given —
that people will let you in.

When the ground shifts, hold onto it,
a psalm’s conviction — remember,
feel as bare at the edge of the sea
as his music says they feel
when tide ebbs in a new morning
and the hills skip like a ram.

Let faces in the street
become new and familiar
like my neighbors playing rock me
baby like a wagon wheel
on the first mild night of spring
and reminding me where I am.


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